You Don’t Have To Rush To Prove You’re Living

There is a certain terror that sets in when you begin to compare your life to the pace of others.

It creeps up on you quietly at first… in the scrolling through social media at night, in the throwaway remarks of those who have traveled far, in the expectations and definitions and parameters that the world has outlined around you. Somewhere along the line, you begin to listen to that whisper and believe it to be true – you are late, you are behind, you are already behind and moving too slowly.

The thing is, you did not create that timeline. It was given to you. The narrative that tells you youth is wasted if it is not urgent, adulthood only legitimate if it arrives at a speed, meaning only possible if you can perform and produce and arrive quickly enough. You did not consent to those terms, but you have been walking with them as if they were scripture.

Maybe this is where the weariness comes in. Not because you are failing, but because you have been running a race you were never meant to be a part of in the first place.

What no one has told you is that stillness is also movement. That remaining in one season longer than expected does not mean you are lost, it means you are alive. That the mornings where you find yourself pausing to catch your breath are not diversions, but arrivals. Life is not tallied in velocity. It is made manifest in presence and depth and texture. The nuance of moments that you cannot taste if you are always hurrying past them.

Think of all the things urgency has robbed from you. The meal you did not taste because you were already too booked and busy to make space for friends. The conversations you never heard because your mind was on the to-do list. The versions of yourself you never discovered because you were always reaching for the next version of yourself. You call that “living” only because the world told you that collapse was evidence of work, exhaustion proof of worth.

You do not have to live that way. You do not have to tally yourself up in terms of deadlines met or boxes to be checked off a list. You do not have to apologize for the pace in your bones. What is for you will not expire because you were not in a hurry to get there. What is written for you will not disappear if you arrive slowly. Walk with me. Rest with me. Breathe with me. Refuse to carry a stopwatch that was never yours to carry in the first place. One day, you will look back and realize it all.

You did not miss your life by slowing down you only found it.